I wrote parts of this during the pandemic year. Others, mid 2023. I'm bad at finishing things.
KMFDM is a German industrial rock-metal act that started in the '80s and has continued to this day. Their name is a German initialism that loosely translates to "no pity for the majority." Perhaps obviously, their music is heavily anti-authority, anti-state, and anti-war.
Their musical style, to quote one of their tracks, is "a spewing volcano of distortion and hate."Shrieking guitars, ear-piercing synths, and chest-compressing drumlines make up the majority of their sound. Since they've been around since the '80s, their style has changed and shifted dramatically over time, with their albums up to 1993 featuring almost no rock sound at all and instead focusing more on slower, gentler, semi-atmospheric work. I don't care for this earlier content, obviously, as I'm really more here for the metal.
Even though their post-1990 work is all heavily rock and metal focused, each album still retains a signature sound. For example, their 1995 album, Nihil, focuses on whispered, growled vocals with hard guitar lines and minimal synth work, while their 2009 album, Blitz, has a greater focus on synths and easy-to-consume dance sounds. The thematic content of the album seems to follow the sound, or perhaps vice-versa - regardless, Nihil is thematically about personal pain and meaning (contrasted with nihilism, hence the name) while Blitz is thematically about the dangers and benefits of mob rule and unification.
I can't say this for certain, as there's no way to source or verify this, but I get the distinct sensation that other musicians have been paying attention to KMFDM for a while now. I keep hearing fragments of other, more recent songs in their past work. Three Days Grace, now that it's fronted by Matt Walst, seems to be unabashedly taking KMFDM's lines. That being said, industrial as a genre has some major common sounds across acts - for example, Take 'Em Out off of Blitz has weirdly similar synth vibes to the Street Breed theme. Yeah, remember World Race? God knows I do, that soundtrack bangs to this day. Plagiarism or "inspiration" aside, the human brain really likes it when sounds happen in a way it predicts, and KMFDM's similarities to other bands mean that I get a little unexpected dopamine hit of recognition periodically, and that's nice.
There's way, way too much music for me to analyze all of it right here. They're highly prolific - they've put out an album every other year, or sometimes every year, since their foundation in 1984, and even on off-years they still compile remix albums of past work to release. Seriously, their discography is huge, which is why I'm just going to list a few of what I consider to be their best tracks down here, and by "a few," I of course mean "many, many of them, because there are many."